Purpose-The purpose of this paper is to propose an effective and economical management platform to realize real-time tracking and tracing for prepackaged food supply chain based on Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, and finally ensure a benign and safe food consumption environment. Design/methodology/approach-Following service-oriented architecture, a flexible layered architecture of tracking and tracing platform for prepackaged food is developed. Besides, to reduce the implementation cost while realizing fine-grained tracking and tracing, an integrated solution of using both the QR code and radio-frequency identification (RFID) tag is proposed. Furthermore, Extensible Markup Language (XML) is adopted to facilitate the information sharing among applications and stakeholders. Findings-The validity of the platform has been evaluated through a case study. First, the proposed platform is proved highly effective on realizing prepackaged food tracking and tracing throughout its supply chain, and can benefit all the stakeholders involved. Second, the integration of the QR code and RFID technologies is proved to be economical and could well ensure the real-time data collection. Third, the XMLbased method is efficient to realize information sharing during the whole process. Originality/value-The contributions of this paper lie in three aspects. First, the technical architecture of IoT-based tracking and tracing platform is developed. It could realize fine-grained tracking and tracing and could be flexible to adapt in many other areas. Second, the solution of integrating the QR code and RFID technologies is proposed, which could greatly decrease the cost of adopting the platform. Third, this platform enables the information sharing among all the involved stakeholders, which will further facilitate their cooperation on guaranteeing the quality and safety of prepackaged food.
The selection of fresh product suppliers is a multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) problem with great significant and application value. This requires trade-offs between multiple criteria to prove its ambiguity and uncertainty. Therefore, a novel two-stage fuzzy integrated MCDM method to select suitable suppliers is employed. In the first stage, two collective relationship matrixes are constructed by quality function development (QFD), and relationships among customer requirements (CRs), company strategies (CSs) as well as selection criteria are considered separately in the two matrixes. Subjective criteria weights are obtained by fuzzy best-worst method (BWM) appropriately. In the second stage, the objective criteria weights are obtained using Shannon's entropy method, and the fuzzy multi-objective optimization by ratio analysis plus the full multiplicative form (MULTIMOORA) is applied to rank suppliers. Finally, an application case is applied to prove the feasibility of the proposed method. These conclusions can help companies improve their CSs and increase their market competitiveness.
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